The role has earned the actress a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Emmy.
Jennifer Coolidge almost missed out on playing Tanya McQuoid. During The Hollywood Reporter's drama actress roundtable, the 61-year-old actress reveals how her now-iconic role on The White Lotus nearly slipped through her grasp.
"Mike and I were going to do another show, which had been turned down by a lot of people, and he mentioned he was going to write [his next] show about rich people on vacation, but I never heard anything more about it," Coolidge tells Claire Danes, Emma D'Arcy, Dominique Fishback, Jennifer Garner and Melanie Lynskey of Mike White, the show's creator.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, Coolidge explains.
"We were like six months into COVID, and I'd been locked up in my house in New Orleans just pigging out on these vegan pizzas. A good friend and I were doing two at breakfast, two at lunch and two at dinner," she says. "We were in COVID, no one knew I'd be getting a call going, 'Hey Jennifer, my show got greenlit, let's go do it. And it’s all going to be on a beach in bathing suits!' So, I was just like, 'No, I'm not doing this,' but I didn’t tell Mike I wasn't doing it. I just said, 'Oh, that's so nice, Mike. God, congratulations.'"
Coolidge says she "thought we were all going to die" during the pandemic, so she adopted a "do whatever you want" mindset in terms of her diet and other aspects in her life.
"But then it started to become a real thing," Coolidge says of The White Lotus, "and I was hearing from business people."
She eventually heard from White too. "[I heard] that little ping in my bedroom in New Orleans at like 2 a.m. and I look down at my phone and it said, 'Are you afraid?' It was from Mike. He knew," she says.
Even with White's insistence that she sign on, Coolidge says she "wasn't going to do" the show, a decision that was due to a mix of "self-hate and not being prepared."
"I think this happens to actresses a lot. You sit around and b**ch your whole life that you've never been given the role of your dreams, and then when it comes, you're like, 'Yeah, I can’t do it. I ate a bunch of pizza.' You can ruin it," she says. "And thank God I have a bestie that just caught on to my bullcrap. She knew exactly what I was doing, and she was like, 'You are an idiot. I'm not going to let you do this.'"
After a successful two-season run on the series -- for which Coolidge has earned a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Emmy -- Coolidge says she's "thrilled" by the turn her career has taken.
"I thought I had had my moment, I had my little comedy bits, my movies, whatever, and the wave had passed. And then this unexpected moment, it's thrilling because I didn't have this for myself," she says. "Maybe when I was 15 and I was like, 'I'm going to be the lead and everything.' I'm just so happy I got this moment before I croak."
When ET spoke to Coolidge in January, she said that her recent success has been "the surprise of a lifetime."
"I feel so alive, you know?" she said. "You go through your life, and you sort of just assume you're used to going a certain way and you just take on whatever that baggage is and that it's never going to change... My life was changed overnight, and I could not be more grateful."
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